Billy Tipton Is Remembered With Love, Even by
Those Who Were Deceived
By Dinitia Smith
The New York Times
Contributed by Elizabeth Parker, Andee W and Holly M
New York
June 2, 1998
On the
morning of Jan. 21, 1989, Billy Tipton, 74, a gifted jazz
musician who was a veteran of the tiny clubs and V.F.W. posts of
small-town America, collapsed on the floor of a mobile home in
Spokane, Wash. Tipton's son William summoned paramedics, and
as they opened Tipton's pajamas to perform resuscitation, they
made an extraordinary discovery. Tipton, who most people had
assumed to be a man, who had had at least five wives and had
adopted three sons, was in fact a woman.
"Did your father ever have a sex change?" the paramedics
asked William, he later recalled.
The news that Tipton, a pianist and saxophonist, was a woman
came as a shock to nearly everyone, including the women who had
considered themselves his wives, as well as his sons and the
musicians who had traveled with him.
And the story has intrigued writers and composers ever since.
The figure of Billy Tipton has become an emblem for the current
fascination with gender, manifest in films like "The Crying
Game," the play "M. Butterfly," and in the burgeoning academic
field of "queer theory," which is entirely devoted to the subject of
sexual identity.
Tipton's life has inspired an opera, "Billy," with music by
Timothy Brock and a libretto by Brian Willis; a play, "Stevie
Wants to Play the Blues," by Eduardo Machado, and a jazz
musical, "The Slow Drag," by Carson Kreitzer, which was performed Off
Broadway in 1996. It was also featured in a theatrical
revue, "The Opposite Sex Is Neither," by Kate Bornstein, a
woman who used to be a man. In Seattle, a group of feminist jazz
musicians founded the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet.
Now a biography, "Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton,"
has been written by the literary scholar Diane Middlebrook, a
Stanford University professor best known for her biography of the
poet Anne Sexton. That book was criticized in some circles for
incorporating transcripts of tape recordings of Sexton's sessions
with her psychiatrist.
Part of the fascination of Tipton's story is in the window it
provides on the world of jazz in the 30's, 40's and 50's, when
popular tastes in music had been honed by radio, and jazz could be
found in almost every town in America. With a few exceptions, like
Hazel Scott, jazz was a man's world.
Whether simply as a matter of sexual choice or to get work in jazz,
Tipton lived the life of a man.
She was an acute observer of male
and female style, and such a successful mimic, that she seems to have
been able to deceive even those with
whom she had the most intimate
contact. For Ms. Middlebrook, Tipton
was a case study in the essentially
fluid boundaries of human sexuality.
The subject provided an opportunity
to explore the question of how much
of what is called male and female is
the result of biology, and how much
is the result of a performance, acted
according to cultural norms.
"She was a great performer," Ms.
Middlebrook said in a recent interview. "I don't think she thought she
was born in the wrong body. That's a
contemporary narrative. She's not a
lesbian, because the women she was
with didn't know she was female. She
occupied an undefinable space. She
was someone who worked creatively
in the gap between biology and gender."
Throughout history, of course,
women have assumed male disguises for economic and social reasons. During
the Civil War, Ms. Middlebrook notes, an estimated 400
cross-dressing women posed as men
and served in the Union Army.
George Sand and Colette both wore
men's clothes. James Barry, a doctor who lived from 1795 to 1863, and
who is credited with performing the
first successful Caesarean section,
was assumed to be a man until her
death, when her true identity was
revealed.
"Billy Tipton literally became a
poster boy for raising consciousness
about the confusion of sex (biological) and gender (culturally meaningful
physical and social attributes),"
Ms. Middlebrook writes. "Billy's
story lets us watch one woman's bold
solutions to gaining a certain amount
of recognition in what was largely a
man's world."
Billy Tipton was born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in Oklahoma
City and
grew up in Kansas City, a center of
jazz. Dorothy came from a prosperous family. Her father, George, was
an aviator, and her mother, Reggie,
to whom she was close, was beautiful
and glamorous. Dorothy was musically talented and studied organ, piano and
saxophone in school.
Getting Around
An Unwritten Law
Ms. Middlebrook's interviews with
members of Tipton's family revealed that the cross-dressing began
when Dorothy tried to find a job as a
jazz musician. Indeed, said Leslie
Gourse, author of "Madame Jazz," a
book about female jazz musicians,
"There was an unwritten code in the
jazz world, that women just didn't
get hired."
To pass as a man, Dorothy bound
her breasts with Ace bandages and
wore a prosthetic device. Later, she
would tell people that she wore the
bandages because of a childhood accident in which her ribs were broken.
Tipton, who had a tenor voice, eventually joined a group called the
Banner Cavaliers, and obtained a Social
Security card as a man.
Early in her career, in late 1938,
she played with Wayne Benson, a
bass player. "She looked like a young
boy," Mr. Benson said in an interview.
"She was acting like a boy. No
one said anything, but as far as I was
concerned, she was a woman. I was
surprised by their surprise when she
died and they found out."
Ms. Middlebrook's book is a
glimpse into the mass culture of the
period.
One of Tipton's first girlfriends was Non Earl Harrell, 14
years her senior and a star of the
marathon dance contests popular at
the time.
By most accounts, women found
Tipton gentle, affectionate and kind.
And she in turn preferred women
who were somewhat self-involved.
"She chose people who don't pay
attention to other people," said Ms.
Middlebrook.
"People who don't notice things. She was also able to
create a feeling of intimacy without
attracting notice."
In 1946, Tipton met a shy, pretty
18-year-old, Betty Cox, and they lived
together as man and wife.
"He was a great performer," Ms.
Cox said in a recent telephone interview. "He had a neat voice, and was
very personable." They had a sexual
relationship, Ms. Cox said. But still,
she said, she didn't know Tipton was
a woman. She came from a sheltered
background where sex was never
discussed.
"Women didn't go around undressed," said Ms. Cox. "You wore a
robe. You didn't leave the lights on
when you had sex."
At one point, she and Tipton tried
to conceive a child, Ms. Cox said, but
she believed she had suffered a miscarriage. Ms. Cox accompanied
Tipton on the road, but she eventually
tired of it, and after seven years
together, the two broke up. "I wanted
to go back home; that was the end of
it," said Ms. Cox, who went on to
marry and have five children.
In 1951, Tipton formed the Billy
Tip Tipton Trio. As leader, she
slicked back her hair and wore a
white dinner jacket. The group's
style was reminiscent of Benny
Goodman's trio and quartet. It
played hits including "Exactly Like
You," "All of Me," "The Way You
Look Tonight" and "It's Only a Paper Moon" and recorded two albums,
"Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Billy
Tipton Plays Hi-Fi on Piano."
"I had no idea he was a woman,"
said Kenny Richards, who played
bass and sang with the trio. "I didn't
know until he died."
In 1958 Tipton had a chance to
break into the big time when the
group was offered a recording contract and a gig opening for Liberace
in Reno, Nev., at more than double its
usual fee. But Tipton said no. One
reason he turned down the chance,
Ms. Middlebrook theorizes, is that
bigger exposure might have revealed who Tipton truly was.
Tipton settled in Spokane, continuing to play jazz, and working
as a
booker in a theatrical agency. There
he met Kitty Kelly, a stripper known
as "the Irish Venus." In a letter to
Ms. Kelly, Tipton called her "a wonderful person, decent and
honest." In
another, she wrote: "I love you with
everything that is in me, and I only
hope that I can make you happy for
the rest of my life."
'We Liked
Each Other'
Ms. Kelly and Tipton settled down
together. Now married and known as
Kitty Oakes, she said she never knew
that Tipton was a woman. Ms. Oakes
said she had an illness that prevented her from having a sexual relationship
with Tipton.
"We didn't share a room," she
said."I was taught to judge the person head on, as they were. Billy was
funny, gentle as a human being. We
liked the same kind of music. We
liked each other."
And they both wanted children.
They went on to adopt three boys,
John, Scott and William. By all accounts, Tipton was an ideal father,
a
Scout master who loved to go on
camping trips with his boys.
"He was the only father I ever
knew," William said recently. "He
was there for us. He didn't go out and
get drunk and beat on us.
"We had a close relationship. We
would go to movies. It was more like
good buddies. We went out to dinner,
or we just sat and talked. It never
occurred to me he was a woman."
For many years, it was a happy
family, Ms. Oakes said. Tipton once
told her in a letter: "You are instilled
so deep in my heart that you have
become part of me. It would be difficult to imagine life without you.
In
our seven years together we have
seen much hurt and much pain, both
physical and mental, and we still
cling to each other."
But as the boys reached adolescence, tensions began to emerge in
the marriage. Ms. Oakes said she felt
that Tipton was not tough enough on
them. "Billy, for whatever reason,
couldn't, or wouldn't, control them,"
she said. Finally, in 1981, the couple
separated, and the boys went to live
with their father.
By now, Tipton was suffering from
arthritis, emphysema and ulcers.
What Ms. Middlebrook calls his "lifelong trait of avoidance" had prevented
him from going to a doctor.
Death
finally came from a perforated ulcer.
After he died, it was left to his
family to unravel the mystery of his
life.
"I know he wanted to tell me,"
said Ms. Oakes. "But he couldn't say,
'I'm tired, I'm old,'" and tell her the
truth.
"Billy did a great Houdini," Ms.
Oakes said, then laughed. "Instead of
treating this as a grand deception,
don't you think it's funny?"
Ms. Middlebrook writes: "Billy
demonstrated by her accomplishment that gender, unlike sex, is in
large part a performance. She was
the actor, he was the role."
Before her death, Tipton had discarded all her sex-concealing
gear,
Ms. Middlebrook writes. "Billy had
prepared to emerge from behind his
screen like the Wizard of Oz, to dissolve the magic into wisdom, revealing
by her nakedness in death that
'the difference' between men and
women is largely in the eye of the
beholder."
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